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Jag made sure his comlink was active. “Boom One.”

He wasn’t fast enough. He’d uttered the first word when Alema gestured. The explosives package he’d affixed to the rail sailed free of the track. It exploded a moment later, far enough away that it did no more to Alema than cause the track she stood on to sway.

She stared up at him, murder in her eyes, and began climbing again, almost as fast as Jaina—faster than Jag’s poor low-gravity thrusters could carry him.

As she climbed, the bent section of track beneath her twisted back the other way, and then again toward her, and finally came free entirely, a broken section four meters long. Rapidly, borne by invisible powers of the Force, it rose past Alema, flying straight toward Jag.

He grimaced. “This is going to hurt.”

The track came level with Jag, a few meters away—then swung toward him like a club, one end remaining in place, the other end hammering at his midsection.

The beskar plate took the force of the blow, but that merely meant it distributed the impact across his entire chest. Jag hurtled to one side like a ball kicked by a rancor, his head and limbs jerking in the opposite direction. His left leg, probably already broken at the thigh, was suddenly engulfed in greater pain, as though his bone marrow had been replaced by a lit lightsaber blade.

He flew perhaps thirty meters. But the flying section of track got ahead of him and swung again, batting him back toward Alema.

Still, the breastplate held. Still he could breathe, could think—barely.

His body a jangled mass of fiery nerve endings, he crashed into the remaining section of vertical track a couple of meters beneath Alema. He managed to clamp his left crushgaunt onto it.

“We are sure you flew your X-wing.” Alema’s face was now covered by a transparisteel mask—probably the same one she wore when escaping her own trap at Gilatter VIII, Jag guessed. Her voice came across his helmet speakers. “Your companions will not have sabotaged it. They want you to escape. So we will leave in it. Small compensation for Ship. Clearly, we need to punish you more.”

It took an effort to make the words emerge in recognizable fashion. “Alema…you’re never going to leave this asteroid. Your insanity, and the last traces of the Dark Nest, end here and now.”

The shock on Alema’s features suggested that she had just witnessed an insect reciting poetry. Profane poetry.

Jag felt his stomach lurch just a little. The track they both held had given way and was beginning to fall.

Alema, distracted by the sudden sensation of free fall, glanced upward.

Fast as a striking sand panther, Jag drew his oversized blaster and aimed it at Alema.

He wasn’t fast enough. She did not even look down at him. While he was in mid-draw, Alema released her lightsaber and crooked a finger at his blaster. It flew from Jag’s grasp into her hand. Her lightsaber floated beside her.

Alema looked down at him and shook her head. “You die because you oppose us, because you insult the nest. But most of all, you die because you refuse to learn.”

Oh, but I do learn. The sensor inside that blaster is now informing its processor that it’s gone beyond a certain distance from me. Five…

“Droids firing lasers—now, that would have been intelligent and dangerous to us.”

Four.

“We cannot feel droid intent, and lasers travel faster than the eye can follow.”

Three.

“Such an attack, executed from secrecy, might well have hurt or killed us.”

Two.

“But now we will simply cut you to pieces.” Alema gestured, and her lightsaber began floating its way toward Jag. She watched, her expression cool and detached beneath her faceplate.

One.

And in that last moment, though Jag had tried to concentrate solely on his pain, on his sense of desperation and failure, something of his growing anticipation must have leaked through his emotional barriers. Alema’s eyes widened. She looked back and forth for the new danger she was just beginning to sense.

The blaster